Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII

Oh it is has been a while since I posted one of these and I have built up quite a backlog of links.

Musical accompaniment for this volume chosen mostly to cause psychic damage against my partner.

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Da Web

The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users — Samuel Proulx

Interesting insights here into how the uses of text to speech for sighted and blind people are fundamentally different and how functionality for the latter is usually, unfortunately an afterthought.

Supertonic is slightly faster, as it can stream result audio as it becomes available, whereas Kitten TTS cannot start speaking until all of the audio for the chunk is fully generated. But for use in a screen reader, a text to speech system needs to begin generating speech as quickly as possible, rather than waiting for an entire phrase or sentence. Users of screen readers quickly jump through text and frequently interrupt the screen reader, and thus require the text to speech system to be able to quickly discard and restart speech.

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A tale of two Webs — Oblomov

A lot of the development efforts (both creative and destructive) in web browsers in the last decade+ has been going into fostering the “web app” vision of the web, to the detriment of the “web of documents” vision. From the removal of native support for RSS and Atom feeds to the introduction of JavaScript APIs like WebUSB or the Web Environment Integrity attempt I already discussed in the past, nearly all work done on browsers has been in this direction.

I feel this a lot. The web of documents now lives in the margins of the web of apps and with Google’s capturing of standards has made maintaining a web browser to keep up with the former impossible without the backing of Google or other huge companies who are increasingly hostile to users having any agency. I feel similarly about operating systems at this point, too. I abandoned Windows on my home computer years ago and since then it has become ever more hostile to users having control over what their machine does. This isn’t new, simply an acceleration of trends that have existed for a long, long time.

As much as I want the “A.I.” bubble to burst I do wonder if the push for “agentic” systems might actually stick simply from the obscene amounts of money being powered into trying to make users handing over nearly all agency and control of their machines to chatbots actually work or be desirable. Currently Windows still does allow itself to be used as an actual desktop operating system, but clearly Microsoft at this point want to push everything towards locked-down, controlled and monitored black boxes, possibly even worse than phones possibly are. How long till they think they can get away with amputating the shrivelled lump of the desktop operating system, cut off direct user access to the filesystem outside of what you have in Dropbox that you pay a subscription for and lock everyone into software from the app store for everyone but enterprise customers who can pay through the nose? Or at least just keep breaking core parts of the operating system until they’re barely useable.

On a more positive note this article also prompted me to add metadata to the site that will work with the Website Navigation Bar addon for Palemoon if you’re using that because I thought it was cute and it was easy to do as I was already using that information to render on-page navigation elements anyway.

And speaking of the web of documents…

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Consider Making 2026 the Year of the Personal Website! — The Virtual Moose

I know I’m going to be preaching to the choir with the kind of people who are reading a personal blog already, but still.

I think it’s also just fun to see what old posts still get traffic. My most popular posts on here are very old ones about how to play the late 90s MMO Asheron’s Call today, ttrpgs based on video games, and the late 90s Microsoft puzzle game Pandora’s Box. It’s more useful and permanent than an unwieldy thread of posts on bluesky or mastodon too, where you would have to refresh it for anyone to even come across it again.

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Stolen Focus — Luna

I do still have to catch and reset myself with various bad computer and social media habits every once in a while. It’s easy to fall into when you are tired and sore and everything that would be interesting or engaging or useful just feels like a massive hump to get over.

By this time, however, I had become once again hopelessly addicted to social media. I wasn’t getting notifications, and I wasn’t fixated on numbers any more, but I was still compulsively checking and refreshing, desperate for the feed to give me another hit of dopamine. I lost hours each day to flicking through TikTok any time I had a quiet moment — rather to flood my brain with stimulation than have to sit in uncomfortable silence even for a moment. A partner and I would engage in a habit we called “TikTok time”, where we’d screen-share the videos we’d Liked recently with each other. Increasingly I was finding I had little to show for the hours I’d spent scrolling the feed. It had become akin to a slot machine; I kept scrolling and scrolling in the hopes that maybe the next video would be something I wanted to see — whatever that was.

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Payment processors were against CSAM until Grok started making it — Elizabeth Lopatto

What else is there to say?

So why is X different? It’s run by Elon Musk. “He’s the richest man in the world, he has close ties to the US government, and he’s incredibly litigious,” says Pfefferkorn. In fact, Musk has previously filed suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate; in a now-dismissed lawsuit, he claimed it illegally collected data showing an increase in hate speech after he bought the platform formerly known as Twitter.

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Games (general)

Horses Is Tame — Chris Person

But of course, if you want to make art…

This is a hegemony of American prudishness, applied globally, incoherently, unevenly, and unseriously. Anybody responsible for these decisions would be vaporized in seconds by a Pinku movie from the 1970s, and if a single person in this chain of command has an arts degree they are pretending they don’t for the sake of an ill-defined idea of business.

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Alternative Games From The Fringes Of Cyberspace — Nathalie Lawhead

And a somewhat more hopeful view on being considering unmonetisable.

The games that exist outside the mainstream, and I think the type of personal empowerment they represent, is what makes them “controversial”.
Especially under the scope of mainstream culture where everything needs to sell, satisfy a commercial value, be consumer centric, or live up to such capitalist standards.

Unmonetized self expression is an act or resistance in today’s tech landscape.

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Why we are making Jank — Brendan Caldwell

Games journalists Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Graham Smith have launched a new games site called Jank that fails to live up to its name by functioning well and not being bloated with ads, tracking, affiliate links, chatbots and other crap that turns sites into a churn of advertisement-friendly sludge.

Perhaps less obvious is the kind of writing that disappears in the process. Articles about new games, niche games, and experimental work don’t get traffic, so off they go. Deeply researched columns from subject matter experts don’t get traffic, so they’re cut. Not many people read interviews, unless you can get someone to say something controversial and pull it out as a news story, so it’s rarely worth talking to developers about their work. Articles designed purely to entertain with daft jokes, such as diary series, don’t deliver numbers at scale no matter how much their readers adore them.

Will this work out? Can they make enough money doing this to actually make a living? I don’t know but I hope so, and I hope they make enough that they can round up a few other Rock, Paper, Shotgun veterans as well. They are also trialling a partnership with the Total Playtime podcast which I am a fan of as well. Supporting one will give you access to the membership perks of the other, at least for the next few months.

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The gamers hate generative AI — Laura Michet

Gamers rise up.

I’ve assumed for a while that gamers would have mild distaste for genAI material, in the same way that they have distaste for asset store assets and, for some reason, the Unity engine. It turns out that I was wrong - they hate it a lot more than either of those things.

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Games (specific)

“interest sources”, contextual interactions for NPCs in Sleight of Hand — Joe Wintergreen

On the more technical side of games I always like reading Joe Wintergreen’s breakdowns of how systems work.

A scenario I’ve found useful to expose a lot of edges cases is a guy pissing against a wall and leaving a puddle of piss. Support this scenario with no aberrant behaviours and you are doing okay.

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Abstraction in Rhythm Doctor — Blueberry Lemonade

How are layers of abstraction perceived? What expectations do they set? At what point do U.I. elements stop being representational and start to become part of the fiction itself?

It sounds small (and it is), but it was a firm example in my mind of how the game was changing the longer we worked on it. Instead of characters simply appearing and disappearing in abstract space whenever they were needed for gameplay, we were now introducing the idea that they are real characters standing in real rooms that are connected to each other. They can walk, or run, from one place to another. They’re living lives of their own when they aren’t being treated.

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The Great Celeste Race 2026 — Caoimhe³

Caoimhe wrote a much better narrative of the annual Celeste race than mine.

This part was a delight. Ruby and I swapped the lead as we often did, but with microscopic gaps becoming the norm. A single death in a puzzle would swap the lead, and hesitating would throw away any advantage we may have had. I lose the lead at the end of the 1500 metres section, at a puzzle I know I hate, and pull it back cleanly at 2000 metres. At 2500 metres, I had a small lead, but here is where the dream ends.

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list animals until failure — Vivian

Here is a new blog with a strong, realistic, game plan for updates and a fun post about the suffering involved in defining how many animals there.

If you’re an entomologist, or an evolutionary biologist, you might say “well, bees and ants are just wasps, really”, and I respect that. But colloquially, bees and ants aren’t wasps. If this game insists on a purely phylogenic approach, then it’s like, come on, I can’t get a point for saying wasp and ant? That’s unreasonable. If I ask a 2-year-old to list animals and she lists wasp and ant, I’m not gonna break out the DNA sequences like “Ohh well evolutionarily ants are technically wasps”. I’m gonna say yeah, good job, that’s two animals.

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Serious stuff (trans)

‘A Directive From Above’: Former NYT Editor Lays Out How The Paper Pushes Anti-Trans Bigotry — Billie Jean Sweeney

A look into how hatred and transphobia gets pushed down from above in the media.

She assigned it to a UK correspondent, who wrote it in the context of UK politics, talked about it being very contentious, talked about the criticisms of its findings. Cass was talking about them herself, this isn’t jumping to any conclusions at that point. It really put it in the context of being this very contentious, very political sort of document.

When I saw it, because we’re a few hours behind, there were 600, 700 words written. I had a pretty good sense of how the story was going to turn out. But within a few hours the story was to the top New York editors, and I don’t know who exactly it was who did that. I assume it was Carolyn or her intermediary. They said ‘oh no, we want the science desk to do that,’ specifically that was Azeen [Ghorayshi], who had been a key reporter in a lot of the other anti-trans coverage.

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I bear the scars of a healthcare system that fails trans people — Jenny Maguire

And another article on the Loughlinstown gender clinic being awful to throw on the pile.

“Oh wow,” she said. “Did you do this yourself?” Immediately, I felt her fingers running through my curls, as if I was a glamorous dog being poked and prodded. Still, I put on a smiley face and went along with this condescending charade. I knew what I needed, and I was not going to cause a fuss — as if I had any choice.

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Serious stuff (general)

Outlive The Bastards — Caoimhe³

May we.

There’s been several eye-opening moments for me in the past few years. Realisations that we can simply do things never before imagined. These rolling revelations haven’t stopped. I can live and love in ways I was never able to before, and nothing can stop this.

So we live. But only in a way that works for us. We dictate how we breathe, how we act, how we medicate, how we live and how we die. How long did I spend dancing to other peoples’ tunes, hoping and begging to be given basic respect, only to be thrown aside? Never again.

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TrAPPed: Arrested by Phone — Anand RK, Suparna Sharma & Natalie Obiko Pearson

Bloody fuck.

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shit i keep seeing: “conflict resolution” via gaslighting — Joe Wintergreen

I fear that I may been this person before but I know I have definitely worked with a guy who did this.

I guess what I’m seeing is guys who’ve never learned to resolve conflict, only to “win”, overcorrecting and becoming what might be termed “conflict-avoidant”, but their avoidance strategy is pretending, the moment there is a conflict, that there isn’t one. If they can get this past everyone in the moment, face is saved and they’re off the hook for a true resolution.

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We Don’t Need Any More Renewables — Adapt : Survive : Prevail

I am endlessly frustrated by people thinking that if we just have more renewable energy then everything else about our suicidal systems of exponential growth and resource extraction will be fine.

So in plain language, here is the actual claim: “We have no choice but to meet all electricity demands and doing so via renewable energy increases greenhouse gas emissions by a lesser amount than fossil fuels.”

Now that we have clarity on the actual claim, we can break it down. The reality is this: 1) We absolutely do have a choice because demand is politically, economically, and socially constructed, and 2) The choice between renewables and fossil fuels is a false binary, like telling a healthy person they must chose between losing an arm or a leg.

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Meaning, Memory and Christmas in Ireland — Seán MacBrádaigh

A brief dive into the complex place of Catholicism in Ireland.

A new state, born of revolution, civil war and counter-revolution, sought stability through moral uniformity. In doing so, it aligned itself closely with a powerful and highly conservative Catholic hierarchy, outsourcing social order, education, health and morality to the Church. This was not a neutral partnership. It produced an official vision of Irishness that was narrow and exclusionary - defining virtue and respectability in rigid Catholic terms.

Rewatched the first Doctor Who episode with Martha with my girlfriend last night and everyone making fun of Martha’s dad’s girlfriend for having so much fake tan and maybe I’m just too used to how much Irish girls overdo it but she looked fine

Have some cat photos.

I have played another game of Magic: The Gathering using my revised Seto Kaiba deck. I lost again!

It was a three-way game between myself, Caoimhe³ and Tigris, who I also played in the previous game I posted about. Tigris was using a revised version of her defender deck with Arcades the Strategist as commander while Caoimhe had Derevi, Empyrial Tactician commanding a deck based around tokens and snowballing counters.

Tigris pulled ahead early, getting a lot of mana production off the ground, aided by Arbor Adherent, allowing her to put out The Pride of Hull Clade, which proceeded to knock out a huge chunk of my life in the first attack of the game. When she tried to put out The Walls of Ba Sing Se I Power Word Killed it immediately and then a turn later was able to use Crux of Fate to wipe the board of everything other than Arcades and a couple of dragons that I had managed to get on the board. With her big mana reserve Tigris remained quite scary and between myself and Caoimhe targeting her after that she was the first to be knocked out.

Unfortunately this did allow Caoimhe enough time to get some of her counter-creating engines up and running with Felidar Retreat having buffed Derevi to the point where it made it difficult to attack with the couple of dragons that I had gotten on the board and Elite Scaleguard stopping me from putting up a proper defence. With the big blow that Tigris had already dealt to me I was loosing life quite quickly. I used Exude Toxin to wipe out the token creatures that she had put on the board thanks to Moogles Valor and Martial Coup but because of Resourceful Defense all the +1/+1 counters on them were able to go straight to Derevi, making her powerful enough to wipe me out with one attack. Forgetting about Elite Scaleguard, I thought that I could hold out for one more turn, so when I drew Haunting Voyage I foretold it, thinking I could activate it next turn to bring a lot of dragons back for a counter-offensive—my graveyard having been filled up a bit previously having milled when Kairi, the Swirling Sky died—but Caoimhe was able to simply tap my would-be blockers and end the game.

I enjoyed the match, though from my two games so far it does strike me that multiplayer games lead to a first mover disadvantage where the first person who gets too strong will be ganged up on. It reminds me of Munchkin in a way that I dislike.

I both ended and started the year madly in love with a new partner. It would be nice to pretend that the middle part didn’t happen.

I ended my post about 2024 saying that I need to recover and heal and I am so tired now reading over that again. My general health is maybe doing a bit better than it was then, or at least I have figured out how to manage things a bit more. I mentioned replacing my mattress there. I have now replaced the awful pull-down wall bed that I had then with a more stable one. I thought, moving into a small house, that I should be optimising for space but I ended up doing so at the expense of my own comfort and long-term health and even then I ended up not even optimising for space very well. I think I am going to go for an even firmer mattress too; going back to Ikea for one was a mistake. Caoimhe³ has a new, firm King Koil mattress sleeping on it I feel an immediate difference. It is expensive but I am probably going to get one for myself.

Early in the year I released that I was suffering from some sort of photosensitivity problem and had been since at least late 2024. Anti-migraine medication has not seemed to help with it but some prescription sunglasses have, as well as simply recognising when it is flaring up and turning down the lights. The cause remains mysterious. M.R.I.s have revealed some demyelinating lesions on my brain and spine, but my neurologist says that they are not on the visual cortex or any other area one would expect to be causing symptoms related to vision and, thankfully, they do not seem to be progressing (though another M.R.I. in April is going to be double-checking that). There is no known history of autoimmune disease in my family that would explain the lesions and apparently the damage not extensive enough to diagnose me with anything serious like M.S. I remain in that grey area of sick enough to have problems, not sick enough to have answers.

But, health issues and general burnout mounting, I did a spring clean this year and got a lof of things off plate. I stepped away from a local trans community organisation, some kink meetup stuff. I pushed myself to keep going with The the Ring Podcast until April because I had an April Fool’s bit that I really wanted to do but ended up putting it on hold after that and did not get around to returning to it for the rest of the year. Journey of the Monkey King has not had an episode for all of 2025, the second time it’s gone on a year-long hiatus. I do want to get back to them but I need to do it in a way that doesn’t just burn myself out again. I am definitely not going to try to stick to a schedule again. Episodes will get done and go out whenever we can manage. I also got formally diagnosed with A.D.H.D. this year and started taking methylphenidate which has been a big help and I felt that I getting my momentum back recently but I got suddenly quite sick again a few weeks ago and it knocked me on my arse. Thankfully, Caoimhe was here to take care of me, as she has been a lot this year¹, as Ellie was doing before she died.

The weeks after that were the worst in my life. I cannot describe the pain of it. But I had wonderful people helping me through it and I was fortunate enough to be able to take an extended period off work. My brother sent me a copy of Abiotic Factor as something to keep my occupied and I ended up playing it nearly every day with my friend Ruby for a while. Caoimhe was amazing as a shoulder to cry on and also just bringing me shepherd’s pies and the like to save me cooking. My other partner in Copenhagen was able to make it over a few times in the aftermath as well and I got to see her in Edinburgh in January and October in Copenhagen itself. I have a lot of wonderful people around me and it’s made it bearable.

I also flew out to a kink con for the first time in the autumn. It had been booked long before Ellie died and while I was not really emotionally up for doing anything with anyone I think it was still a very useful experience. I took a lot of notes that I have since brought back to Caoimhe and everyone was very lovely and understanding about me crying all the time. I did a lot of sexual exploration the past year and it has been a really positive and freeing experience. Not unrelatedly I have put in a request for bottom surgery through the public system. That will take a while but I think I do want to go through with it, scary as it is. I don’t think I’d be able to deal with the recovery period without a partner at this point, though. I have been living alone with just Easóg for a long time, but that has felt a lot lonelier since Ellie died.

But I still have people I love dearly, and we keep going. I got a few lines from a poem that Ellie would quote when she was struggling tattooed on my arms as a reminder of that and of her.

I love you, get up, we are going to keep going.

It could not kill me, I would not die.

Update: Caoimhe³ has also written a post about the race with a bit more narrative detail than my terse summary and statistics below.

The New Year’s Celeste race I do with friends happened today. When I sat down to practise this year I decided to just replay the game from the start, redoing all the main levels, getting all the strawberries and crystal hearts again, etc. I fully cleared¹ the A and B sides of chapters one through six and fully cleared the A side of chapter seven and then failed to find the time to do an actual practise runs for the race. Whoops. But I still managed to set a personal best for the race, which surprised me because I felt quite fatigued today during the race and didn’t feel that I was doing my best.

Even so, it was Ruby who came out on top again—managing to come in under the hour mark!—with Caoimhe³, joining for the first time, in second.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	0°59′30.986″	69	1
🥈Caoimhe³	1°02′14.985″	123	1
🥉Caoimhe′	1°07′39.175″	143	0

And of course we also did a pre-run warmup race of Pico-8 Celeste.

🏃	⏱️	💀	🍓
🥇Ruby	4′50″	26	1
🥈Caoimhe′	5′28″	26	0
🥉Caoimhe³	7′42″	57	1

I was intending on having some friends over the other day for a small party and give them each a small Christmas present but I ended up being too ill to host. I had one present that I was going to give to Caoimhe³ early too (the rest to be saved for Christmas Day), selected mostly as an excuse to show off in front of other people because it’s the one thing I made for them myself: A pair of belt and boot chains in the nonbinary flag colours.

I was inspired by these chains from Renders Renderings and seeing as they were all out of stock I decided to fashion my own. I made mine with thinner chains and I am a little worried that they might be too delicate but I had trouble sourcing small lengths of coloured chains in larger sizes and thought it would look better to get ones that came the in right colour rather than trying to spraypaint them. If they end up breaking I still have some more chain so I might try and fashion something that is less likely to be caught on things or be subjected to force.

Caoimhe came over the day that party was meant to happen anyway to look after me a little and I gave them to her then and she seems very pleased with them. I love my nonbinary girlfriend :)

I played one game of Magic: The Gathering back in uni at a games night against one other person who had also never played it before and won. Yesterday I played my second game: A commander match against Caoimhe and our friends Tigris and someone who I will be calling a zombie enthusiast.

I was, of course, using the Seto Kaiba deck¹ that Caoimhe had made for me. Caoimhe herself had Lazav, Dimir Mastermind as her commander with a deck based around milling everyone’s cards. The zombie enthusiast also had a mill-heavy zombie deck led by Gisa and Geralf. And Tigris had Arcades the Strategist commanding a deck otherwise made mostly of walls.

It was a lot of fun and I did quite well despite not having really studied the deck that had been made for me that much beforehand. It took a while before much started to happen but as I started to get a few dragons on the board Tigris quickly became a very intimidating threat with a Corrupted Shapeshifter duplicated by Mirror Room and boosted by Arcades the Strategist giving her two 12/12 creatures. Some Lightning Greaves on Arcades also meant that the dragon was difficult to get rid of as well. Our zombie enthusiast was also building a nasty horde including deathtouch, easily revivable Poxwalkers.

In response to an increasingly scary board state I summoned Junji, the Midnight Sky then Damned the board to wipe the slate clean, using Junji’s death ability to put Corrupted Shapeshifter back on the field as 0/12 blocker for myself, which Tigris complained about not being able to get past for the rest of the game. It was Caoimhe’s turn after mine and she played something I don’t recall that exiled the zombie graveyard, taking the horde off the board a little while. Those two back-to-back Caoimhe turns were a real blow for the other side of the table. Not that we were playing teams; myself and Caoimhe just happened to be sitting next to each other. And I repaid Caoimhe for her part of the double-whammy by knocking her out of the game at the first opportunity I got, which she congratulated me on.

I was doing well for some time, with the most life of everyone for much of the game, but eventually myself, Tigris and the zombie enthusiast all got whittled down to single-digit life. Junji got raised from the dead twice during the game, once as a zombie and once by me, and Tigris’ walls were not able to block it’s menacesome flying and was killed by it, leaving only myself and the zombies.

I think I managed some Yu-Gi-Oh! worthy reversals a few times, countering some nasty spells, using Aetherize to ward of horde of zombies that would have finished me off, and then stopping their master from being able to attack me at all with Sivitri, Dragon Master as she didn’t have enough life to pay the tax to attack me. But, unfortunately, life didn’t otherwise matter to her as she was able to play Lich’s Mastery when I didn’t have any mana to counter it and then could not find a way to remove. By then she had refilled her graveyard and I was just not able to do enough damage to empty it as she used it as her replacement life pool. I thought I was being very clever spending a couple of turns using Soul Manipulation to revive Hammerhead Tyrant and then using its ability while recasting my commander so I could send Lich’s Mastery back to her hand but I failed to notice that it had hexproof. Phyrexian Arena had been serving me well in getting me more cards throughout the game but now it was acting as a countdown for the number of turns I had left and even though the zombies couldn’t attack me she still had other things that could drain my life. In the end I was finished off by her playing my own Brainstealer Dragon from my graveyard, trigging its ability and killing me². Ugin, the Spirit Dragon could have saved me from Lich’s Mastery but this is not Yu-Gi-Oh! and it does not count as a dragon just because it has the word “dragon” in the card name, so Sivitri, Dragon Master could not pull it from my deck for me.

It was a lot of fun! Thanks to some megamorph creatures I even got to say “I play one monster face down and end my turn!” One thing the game did highlight is how, even though having a flying 6/6 on call was useful, Dromar, the Banisher is even worse than we all realised at first because his ability hits all creatures of a chosen colour, including himself. So unless you’re targetting 🌶️ or 🌳 with it you are dismissing your own commander every time you use it and in this game no one had any 🌶️ cards and Tigris was the only one with 🌳, Caoimhe and the zombies’ commanders both being 💀💧.

I am playing with revising the deck with Sivitri as commander rather than Dromar. This means no more ☀️ but that was the least-used colour in the deck anyway and of the custom proxies I made it only loses Smothering Tithe. Caoimhe has objected that “a little bit of white mana is useful for Kaiba to be portrayed as not entirely evil,” but on the other hand, nah.

An increasing number of people close to me are into, have been getting into, or are getting back into Magic: The Gathering. I don’t have a massive reluctance to learning or playing it but there’s a big upfront investment in learning it and I wasn’t particularly motivated to, but I was picking bits of it over time just from conversations with friends and I was on a nostalgia kick for Yu‑Gi‑Oh! recently so eventually I agreed with Caoimhe³ to play iff she made me a commander decker themed around Seto Kaiba.

This Reddit post outlined a basic idea for a deck with Dromar, the Banisher as a commander and other themes that were identified for the deck where: dragons, machine monsters, lads with big axes and the words “raider” or ”kaiser” in their names and big flashy trap cards that fuck up the opponent’s deck because this is first a comic about card games with big dramatic reversals and second a an actual card game. As well as Dromar repping the mandatory Blue-Eyes White Dragon I was keen on having some representation of some other cards I always associate with Kaiba like Crush Card Virus, Lord of D. and XYZ‑Dragon Cannon. I also wanted to have at least a few cards that functioned similar to trap cards or flip effect monsters from Yu‑Gi‑Oh!

Another friend threw out a list of card suggestions, though warned that Dromar was not a particularly good card to build a deck around. I pointed out that that was appropriate seeing as Ol’ Blue Eyes itself is fairly rubbish in practice and I am not intending to enter tournaments here, just play with some friends. I also suggested toning down the amount of cards from her suggestions that involve searching through the opponent’s deck, as doing that constantly sounds miserable for everyone involved in the game, especially when I’m new and wouldn’t really know what to look for.

Caoimhe took all of this and did her best to turn it into a usable deck list. I have no intention of spending a load of money buying cards, I am just going to print off proxies for all of these (the fact that I have a printer has also made me popular amongst my friends who play) and I have had some fun making some Yu‑Gi‑Oh!-styled proxies of the cards for the deck using the YGO Pro card editor, Card Conjurer and the GNU Image Manipulation Project.

Jester’s Cap combines the Crush Card Virus and Saggi the Dark Clown, which Kaiba often used together. I originally used the trap card layout for this but decided to save that just for cards with foretell, as those are going to be the ones played face down and settled on leaving artefacts as normal spell cards.

I might make some more if any particularly cute or fitting ideas strike me, but I don’t intend to do the entire deck. Trying to do a full hundred cards would quickly go from fun to tedious.

And now I need to actually play a game.

It would have been Ellie’s 43rd birthday yesterday. She had a fairly difficult life and it made her shy, reserved and awkward. Over the time I knew her I got to see start to shed so much of that, becoming more confident, more happy, more silly, more herself. It was absolutely marvellous to witness. It felt like her life was finally getting started before it was so suddenly cut short. She only told me about Kat a week before they died. There are many parts of her life I only knew the scantiest details of. So many little glimpses into her that I wanted to spend years learning more about. Sometimes I just wish I could just learn any little bit more about her. It would have been amazing to see her in five, ten years. To see her grow completely into herself.

If I want to turn this into some kind of positive message: It is a tragedy that it took until her forties to get to where she was, and an even bigger tragedy to have her life cut short just as that was happening, but she was still able to start doing that in her forties. To figure things out, to transition, to come to terms with part of herself, to love without shame. As long as you are alive there is still time.

I went out for dinner with some of our friends last night to the same burger place we went on her birthday last year. We talked about Ellie a little bit but mostly just enjoyed each other’s company. It was a nice thing to do to mark the occasion in a positive way. Caoimhe³ was there as well. She has been one of the people who has most helped me through the last few months and more recently we have started dating as well. She was a great comfort yesterday and she spent last night at my place after the dinner.

I brought the Zippo lighter to the dinner that I gave to Ellie as a birthday present last year. I lit for a while to warm it up and held in my palm for a little bit during the meal. She had had a running joke that what she wanted for her birthday was €200 worth of marsh­mallows, so I gave her €20 of marsh­mallows with the lighter as the initial deposit on that that she could toast and make s’mores with. €20 gets a lot of marsh­mallows it turns out. I don’t think that she had even gotten through them all by the time she died. After that dinner last year we went back to her’s and watched the trans episode of Dirty Pair (which she didn’t actually like that much outside of the transness and burgers, something I left out of the original post about it) and we also watched the first episode of the Chucky show together after she had been recommending it to me. It was a wonderful night, and, sad as it was, so was last night as well.

Caoimhe³ has a Toyota GT86 named Takumi that she is taking out for a track day tomorrow. I gave her a little something today to commemorate it.

I got a 1:36 scale model car online and originally simply intended to give that to her as a gift, but the idea of making a small diorama for it struck me and I threw this together yesterday in a fit of anxious hyperfocus. The construction was a mess and I was surprised with how well it turned out in the end.

Pretty much everything that you can see other than the car and the foam it’s mounted in came from a local model shop.

The cobblestones were originally a uniform grey but I painted them with some watered down black paint to sink into the crevices and then heavily drybrushed grey over them to give a little bit of depth. The footpath could have perhaps done with similar treatment but I didn’t think any of the paints I currently had were very suited.

The streetlamps, perhaps a bit out of scale with the car as well as not being mounted particularly straight, are powered by 3V from two AA batteries, which are mounted in a battery holder with a power switch that I cut from a length of fairy lights and sloppily soldered to the lamposts. It’s rough and I think the connections are liable to break if it needs to be taken out for a battery change, but it works and the switch to turn the lights on and off is accessible through a discreet hole cut in the side of the foam.

The foam itself is just something I found thrown with some other miscellaneous rubbish in the press under the stairs while looking for something to mount this on and ended up being almost perfectly shaped to hold the segment of road as well as having depth enough to hide the battery pack. I didn’t even have to cut it other than the hole for the lightswitch.

Do NOT call yourself a woman unless you can be equipped with Malevolent Nuzzler.

https://sandyspalace.ie/2025/08/25/You-Wont-Believe-This-Game-Exists.html

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII

I have been rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 and talking about it with friends a lot so here is my favourite of all the intros from it or Brotherhood (it’s just the first intro from Brotherhood).

Also just a small rant: I hate how the top results on Youtube for this kind of stuff is always horrible interpolated to 60FPS upscaled crap that ruins the animation.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I have conflicting urges to want to write more and do more but also I know I need to rest more. Don’t expect me to be Blaugusting. I am actually trying to get as much off my plate as possible and not commit to things, including pruning my RSS feeds quite a bit so I feel less obliged to keep up with so much. Everything is difficult 👍🏻

But I have still been reading and have things to share. No particular order or categories to things this time.

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The Narrative Fallacy — Nikhil Suresh

On how a compelling narratives not just get people to buy into ideas, but obscure otherwise very obvious flaws, and how the use of narratives in this way is actually taught and enforced in university education.

No, the real point is that the claims from this study are ridiculous and intelligent people that have been studying for years can’t pick up on it. The real point is that I am actually really confused as to how Piff got his results, but at least I’m not tricking myself into thinking I know what’s going on. Did he fudge the numbers? Was the experiment poorly set up? Just pure bad luck in sampling? Hell, is the result true? I don’t know, but I will say that you don’t know either.

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The Missing 11th of the Month — David R. Hagen

Why is the 11th of each month (other than September) consistently underrepresented in the Google Books database as shown in this XKCD comic? The answer is typographical.

When I began this study, I was hoping to find a hidden taboo of holding events on the 11th or typographical bias against the shorthand ordinal. Alas, the reason is far is far more mundane: a numeral 1 looks a lot like a capital I or a lowercase l or a lowercase i in most of the fonts used for printing books. An 11 also looks like an n, apparently. Google’s algorithms made mistakes when reading the 11th from a page, interpreting the ordinal as some other word.

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So-Called “AI” Cannot Program — Natalie Weizenbaum

This really resonated with me. The most frustrating projects I have coded for are the ones where people have not thought through the meaning of what they are asking for, where they ask “make this work” with no clear definition of what working looks like outside of the most idealised possible scenario without consideration of real world use, let alone edge cases or failure states. I feel “a programmer is paid to refine semantics” to my bones.

Programming is the act of making a computer enact a semantic task. The computer’s silicon internals, its RAM and hard disk and even its pixels, are the syntax here. It has no intrinsic meaning, just a set of ones and zeros and a very complex set of rules for transforming them. The semantics are the human interpretation of what it’s doing and why, the understanding of those numbers and pixels as a map to the nearest ramen joint or a simulation of a puppygirl begging for treats.

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(a) cohost postmortem: life after death — Jae Kaplan

I still get far too emotional thinking about Cohost.

the reality of social media is that unless you have an Audience, you are probably better served among friends.

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Revisiting Chapters: Tyrion V, ACoK — Turtle-paced

I really love A Game of Thrones and I used to read a lot of fan analysis stuff and listened to a couple of podcasts just about the series. Turtle-paced is the one person in that sphere that I still follow and I still really enjoy reading her deep dive chapter analyses when she posts them. She does, as the name of her blog implies, post them at the rate of a testudine and it is a nice occasional treat for me.

This is just how it is, per Tyrion. His response is not to address the unfairness but to show gratitude for the benefits he enjoys. The idea that everyone should have those privileges does not cross his mind. It’s a way in which he’s like Cersei. Though again, and as usual for the Lannister siblings, this is also a product of an abusive home. Tyrion’s only protection against the various injustices he faces in life due to his disability come from being a Lannister. The idea that everyone should have Lannister-level privileges is a threat to him - which in turn is a belief born of despair that of course everyone will hate him for his disability, and this can never change.

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GameCube controllers in Sunfluffs — Azure

Putting native Gamecube controller in a new PC game, cool! Seen via Misty.

okay so, something that’s been bugging me for 15+ years but i never realized how to put it into words until recently: regular game controllers have different layouts depending on if you’re in gameplay or in menus.

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Moon Light Café — CD-ROM Journal

Another multimedia CD.

Writing about early CD-ROMs means coming across a lot of early examples of things that became famous later. Sometimes that means finding new and exciting angles on something familiar… and sometimes it means something that’s only notable for being early. Today’s disc is one of those.

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What I’m Reading, Volume 3 — Caoimhe

My clone also shared some interesting links, including an article about the decline of bin stores, a type of business I didn’t even know existed and beautiful photos of industrial waste dumps in Russia.

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Ancient Globalism: Rome, India, China, & Beyond — Nathan Goldwag

Ancient trade is cool! The past was international!

Titianus himself was a Macedonian, as well as a Roman citizen, and reflects just how complex and multifaceted these exchanges truly are. We talk of “Rome” and “China” as unitary civilizations, exchanging speech and goods like two singular individuals, but of course both were mere representations of vast conglomerations of peoples, cultures, and nations, all of which were constantly in flux. At Shatial, in the Karakoram Mountains of the Punjab, more than 1,000 inscriptions and 700 petroglyphs were carved into the rock near a key pass, recording names, dates, and prayers from travelers. They appear mostly in Sogdian, Middle Persian, Parthian, Aramaic, Brahmi, and Kharosthi. Nine are written in the extinct Bactrian language, one uses Chinese characters, and one is in Hebrew.

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Rachel’s iPod — Luna

A short lament about erasing someone’s past from an old device.

Have you ever bought a pre-owned game cartridge or MP3 player or something, and the previous owner’s data is still on it — and for a brief moment, you feel a sense of connection with that stranger through their lingering data, and a twinge of sadness at the idea of deleting it to use the device for yourself?

Hell, I have felt sad in the past about clearing out my own childhood savedata from a cartridge. A few years ago I was able to boot my old copy of Soleil and was greeted with save files under my deadname as well as my brother and sister’s names.

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Let’s make up fantasy consoles for fun — Kyle Labriola

Seen via Mike Egan’s link roundup.

If you could wave a magic wand and wish a new fantasy console into the world…what would it be like? What constraints would it have to force developers to get creative? If it came with hardware, like the Playdate, what would the console physically be like?

This is something I have actually thought about before. One of the myriad little ideas filed away that I will certainly never have time for (and would have to learn many, many new skills to ever do myself) and if I ever do get time for it the moment for it will probably have passed. But the idea of a Pico-8 style fantasy console with its own integrated development environment but 3D with an eye to creating PSX-style visuals in the way that been in vogue, especially with horror games with a Crocotile-style friendly editor for mapping and modelling has been fermenting in my mind for years.

And very importantly it would also be paired with a secondary, 2D, low-spec fantasy console similar to Pico-8 (some musings of this involved it being a Pico-8 clone that could run Pico-8 carts itself, but maybe that would be stepping on Zep’s toes too much) that could play its own separate games as well as link to main console to act as a simple secondary screen like a VMU, either running it in a separate window on the same desktop or else running on your phone linked via wifi connection. Have extra HUD info on the second screen, control a game entirely through your phone with a unique interface, pass it to a friend and allow extra asymmetrical co-op control, download a chao to your phone! I am aware that second-screen peripherals have been done a load of times and it has basically always bombed but I don’t care I love control and interface gimmicks and am eternally enamoured with stuff like the Dreamcast port of Silent Scope allowing you to use the VMU screen as an incredibly low fidelity scope and Zombi U’s gimmick of making you look away to the Wii U gamepad so much to divide your situational awareness in stressful situations.

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What My Hysterectomy Taught Me About Bodily Autonomy and Misogyny — Kelly

Medical misogyny is nothing surprising to me but this lays it out very strongly.

There was no medical reason to keep it. You don’t need your uterus to survive, it’s only function is to be a womb. If you keep your ovaries you won’t even go into early menopause. Yet they made it clear that saving my womb was more important than my life.

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Why are games scary? — Laura Michet

But at a certain point, you have got to stop accepting the argument that an amateur Daz 3D porn game is worth an international uproar, no matter how transgressive and offensive it’s trying to be.

I think this raises an interesting question of why anyone is bothered to take a game like No Mercy seriously at all. I do think there is an interesting idea in how games so very opaque to a lot of people that they don’t necessarily intuit the obvious difference between a shovelware porn game and something with the the actual cultural impact of, say, Call of Duty in the way that they obviously can between a Holywood movie and some random porn film but I do feel like it is something more culturally based than games just been too long and too much of an investment to experience.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII

Your musical entertainment:

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Media

The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch — Forrest Wickman in Slate

A look at how creative decisions and compromises get made on a movie set.

You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.

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Heaven Will be Mine – Caoimhe

My clone recently discovered Worst Girl Games and has been having a time of it. When I played it I actually didn’t click with Heaven Will Be Mine nearly as much as We Know the Devil but Caoimhe’s words on it are making me want to revisit it.

Heaven Will Be Mine is short and sweet. A full playthough is roughly five hours. Within that time, it packs a narrative of the trans struggle for identity and recognition, the search for meaning in a perpetually hostile world, the never-ending quest of humans’ self-discovery and exploration, and of course cool mechs beating each other up.

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A List Of Games By Trans People Before 2010 — Dot Maetrix

Cute little list and led me to this fun interview from Bad Games Hall of Fame with Rebecca “Burger” Heineman and to revisit this interview with Megumi, the programmer of Virtual Lab¹ that I had read before.

Not gonna lie I did NOT realise how long Maddy Thorson had been doing Trans-People-Can-Double-Jump Platformers before making this list. Like, I thought that Celeste was primarily her drawing from the twitchy platformer style of Super Meat Boy but as it turns out, lmao nope Not only does Jumper predate Meat Boy by sevaral years, but the lead character, Ogmo, went on to appear as a playable character in Super Meat Boy, acknowledging the influence that game had taken from Thorson’s work. Like, I fully had the order of cause and effect completely wrong here.

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Chips Theory, In Brief: Doctor Who’s Unresolved Aesthetic Debate — Tamsyn Elle

I swear that I am not going to keep linking to blogs by lifeforms that have been bred for thousands of years to sustain themselves solely on ever-more incomprehensible Doctor Who criticism but I needed to share the chips–soufflé spectrum model of media analysis with the world.

Note how chips becomes synecdoche for an ordinary life, an inescapable pillar of the daily grind as fundamental as work, home, sleep, and commuting. Chips is what the rest of us do.

There’s an inescapable class element to this. Science fiction is often accused, with some justice, of being a middle-class genre; even when it’s militaristic our focus tends to be on the officer class. A good deal of the value of Rose in the first place is that, as a working-class soap opera type of character, she does not at first seem to belong on Doctor Who. Indeed, often that’s part of her quality: in her first episode it’s her experience in her school’s gymnastics team, silver medal, swinging on a chain, that saves the day with straightforward physicality where the Doctor’s talk of Shadow Proclamations and anti-plastic failed to hold sway. Then she’s befriending the lowly mechanics and servant girls who turn out to be key to their respective stories.

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Thoughts on IDW Transformers: The Furman Era — Bobby Schroeder

A nice little piece laying out some interest aspects of the Transformers series² through the lens of a particular run of comics including the historically weird handling of gender and how later IDW comics corrected that.

When James Roberts began writing the fan favorite series More Than Meets the Eye, he wanted to explore the subject of Transformer romance. And if Furman said that there aren’t any women on Cybertron, then, well… I guess he’s been left no choice but to declare it the robot yaoi planet! His hands were simply tied, folks.

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Media ∩ Technology

The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland — Bret C. Devereaux

Look. If Bret Devereaux is going to keep writing articles analysing the practicalities of speculative fiction tropes I am going to keep linking to them.

Complicating this picture further are spare parts. Without the ability to manufacture bespoke spare pairs at scale, keeping these vehicles in operation is going to be very difficult. So we ought to expect to see, alongside an emphasis on fuel efficiency, a preference for robust, easy-to-maintain platforms that use widely available civilian vehicle components, rather than hard to source or scavange military components. After all, asking your local junk mechanic to service the AGT1500 gas turbine engine in an Abrams MBT is going to be a pretty big ask, compared to finding the parts to fix the engine of yet another Toyota pickup.

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Why We Don’t Have UIs Like the ones in Neon Genesis — Zemnmez

Damn now I want a vector-based display again.

Everyone who works with interfaces should be looking at these and asking themselves why interfaces don’t look like this. Where did we go so wrong? Where’s the big fuckup where we ended up with like, windows 95 instead of this shit? This is something I have devoted untold and definitely irresponsible brain space to. And honestly, the best answer I have is very simple, but I think also a kind of interesting look at how our tools shape the designs we make.

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I wasted $410 recreating a fake website that shows up for 10 seconds of a TV show almost no one remembers — Alyx Wijers

Wijers doing an extremely important job 🫡

When I watch TV and movies, I sometimes notice web addresses. I’ll usually note them down, and look them up later to see if they’re registered. In most cases, they’re registered by the studio or network or whatever and just redirect to their site. AMC, for example, keeps www.savewalterwhite.com up from Breaking Bad (now 12 years after the series ended, as of the time of writing), and www.cometlist.net up from Halt and Catch Fire.

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Technology

Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents — David Kriesel

Quite an old one but recently linked to by Tina. What if your scanned just randomly changed numbers around in the scanned image? What multiple models of scanners from the largest manufacturer in the world did that for years without being fixed? There is also an accompanying video.

In this article I present in which way scanners / copiers of the Xerox WorkCentre Line randomly alter written numbers in pages that are scanned. This is not an OCR problem (as we switched off OCR on purpose), it is a lot worse – patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous way: The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect. Without a fuss, this may cause scenarios like:

1. Incorrect invoices
2. Construction plans with incorrect numbers (as will be shown later in the article) even though they look right
3. Other incorrect construction plans, for example for bridges (danger of life may be the result!)
4. Incorrect metering of medicine, even worse, I think.

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I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back — Fireborn

First of a series of posts on this blog dealing with the hell that is trying to use Linux while blind.

Linux claims to support blind users here. It even ships the tools. But using them? Getting speech or braille output when you need it most? That’s a punishing mess of driver quirks, missing defaults, audio stack failures, and layers of modern regression hidden under the surface.

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Avoiding becoming the lone dependency peg with load-bearing anime — Xe Iaso

Anubis is a piece of software that has become popular for helping block unfriendly crawlers that have been overloading a lot of sites to grab data for neural network training without care for the damage they are doing to the web. It also has an cartoon character mascot that has proven useful for weeding people who like being dismissive pricks.

At some level, I use the presence of the Anubis mascot as a “shopping cart test”. If you either pay me for the unbranded version or leave the character intact, I’m going to take any bug reports more seriously. It’s a positive sign that you are willing to invest in the project’s success and help make sure that people developing vital infrastructure are not neglected.

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Technology ∩ Capitalism

Why Bell Labs Worked. — Areoform

Seen via a post by Fabio Manganiello going further into Bell’s treatment of people compared to what companies and academia both demand of them now, shared by Xerz and boosted by Jennifer Glauche which also inspired the next post by Elilla.

Reportedly, Kelly and others would hand people problems and then check in a few years later. Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, “what’s stopping someone from just slacking off?” Kelly would contend that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?”

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Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google — Elilla

On the empty promises and dehumanisation of Google.

It’s the little things that bugged me, how people would eat the free candy or have a bowl of cereal and just leave trash and dirty dishes everywhere for the cleaning ladies (contractors) to deal with; more than that the way nobody looked at them or said “thank you”. We Brazilians have a social class for that, a social code underlying that studied invisibility, I knew what this was: these were maids. Servants. The women in my family, my friends at school. The “campus” was pretty open and my then-wife visited it a few times; it creeped the Fuck out of her, the distinction between people and non-people.

This roundup is going to link to and quote articles dealing with sex, kinks, sexual assault and also fascism at the end.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII

Taking a page from Mike I am going to include a suggested piece of music to listen to while you read this; the first track from my Cohost song of the day playlist, the title theme from Robocop for the Game Boy:

I’ve divided this into two sections, the first for people who I haven’t linked to as part of these roundups before and the second for people who I have.

New challengers

Hermit Crab Intimacy (On Visitors) — Rabbit

Home, intimacy and vulnerability.

When I live somewhere, I feel like my life saturates it and sinks into the walls, like cigarette smoke. Every strong emotion I feel creates an energy that overtakes the room for a while; if I had a big hard talk with my partner in the old living room, I knew it was over when we moving upstairs to relax in bed, and the feeling would be left behind. And over time, the kitchen isn’t just the place where I cook, it’s where I care for my loved ones; the bedroom isn’t just the place where I sleep, but where I connect with my partner and feel safe at night. The house is not just a house. It is a home, a being, a body that I have a relationship with that requires love and care and patience. Cleaning my house feels like also shoveling out all of that psychic debris. It is an act of care for the place, and an act of care for myself. I have always been part of a house; my home has always been part of me.

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design thoughts: let things be rare — Joe Wintergreen

Some game design thoughts.

Some things are cool because they’re rare, and that’s the whole reason. You can implement a cool feature, say “wow, that’s cool, we should make that happen more”, and just like that, it’s not cool. It’s no longer a story players tell each other. The first time you play Splinter Cell Conviction, and you’re hanging off the side of a building waiting to pull another guy out a window, and a particularly savvy guard actually leans out a window and checks the side of the building – that’s amazing! What a smart, weird thing to do! But then they do it again, always. It’s not reactive or rare, like you thought, so it’s no longer cool. You won’t be saving that clip.

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I Love Niche Problems — Caoimhe

I am not a Formula One girlie but Caoimhe’s passion for saving and sharing the history of it is inspiring.

Long story short, I’ve been building up a rather popular niche in the high seas community. My archive of F1 media is solid, comparable to plenty of other buffs around the world, but I’ve made a commitment to sharing it as widely as possible, for as long as possible.

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The Digital Packrat Manifesto — Janus Rose for 404 Media

Relatedly, a celebration of media hoarding. Anything on any streaming service, on a website, can be taken away without notice. What’s yours is yours, and also organising a Jellyfin server is very satisfying.

Sure, there are websites where you can find some of this material, like the Internet Archive. But this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria, built from external hard drives, OCD, and a strong distrust of corporations. I know I’m not the only one who has gone to these lengths. Sometimes when I’m feeling gloomy, I imagine how when society falls apart, we packrats will be the only ones in our village with all six seasons of The Sopranos. At the rate we’re going, that might not be too far off.

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Johnson. A Plane Man — Hyphinett

A little downpour game made from a Ryanair Boeing 737 safety manual :)

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Returning champions

A Hackable, Custom, Magic Wand (Plus) Board — Kore

Kore’s third post about hacking a Hitachi wand, as previously seen in the first and fourth roundup.

So: the Hitachi Magic Wand is a very good device. It, however, has very little granularity in how strong it is. Even the newer Magic Wand Plus only has four, non-customizable settings.

I don’t like this and want to fix it. In the process, I’ll also be adding bluetooth connectivity, because I thought that was pretty funny.

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The Cuddled Little Vice — Elizabeth Sandifer

I have previously linked to Sandifer’s writing on Doctor Who and inane September the 11th memorial comics but another one of her long-term projects is The Last War in Albion, a sprawling series of essays which she describes as “a history of British comics. More specifically, it is a history of the magical war between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore”. After a long hiatus she is back with a book-length article on Neil Gaiman. This is obviously written in light of the sexual assaults that have come to light, but is neither a polemic nor trying to turn his works into some sort of gotcha against him or his fans. It is a clear-eyed and fair assessment of the merits and flaws of his work woven with the story of the man himself and of his craft, his cynicism and his actions.

When one talks about Sandman being foundational to millions of people, one is talking not exclusively but substantially about teenage girls of the 90s and 00s who were into goth subculture. And a fundamental part of its appeal is that its best character—the one who gets all the good lines and who the reader is all but forced to love—looks like them. In contrast to Cinnamon Hadley, who was a bold fashion and makeup experimentalist, at the end of the day dressing up like Death required little more than a black tank top, black jeans, some boots, a cheap piece of jewelry, and a bit of practice with an eyeliner pen. It is difficult to think of another iconic character in comics that was routinely first encountered by people who were already cosplaying her. It’s no surprise that many of those young goth girls passionately identified with her, nor that they became adoringly loyal fans of her creator—fans that he would spend the rest of his career both catering to and preying upon.

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The Strange Armor of Dragon Age: The Veilguard — Bret C. Devereaux

Last time I linked to two of Devereaux’s pieces and am doing so again. Following on from his piece about sci-fi body armour we have this analysis of the armour of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

And that actually makes a fair bit of sense: if you expect to be fighting in close combat, you hardly want anything on your person adding encumbrance or weighing you down or providing an extra easy hand-hold for someone to grab and pull at. And more to the point, your ancient or medieval soldier doesn’t need them because he has nothing to put in a bag or pouch that he needs to grab in combat. His primary weapon and shields, after all, are carried in his hands, his armor is worn on his person, his backup weapon is in a scabbard at his waist…and that’s it. Archers might carry arrows in a quiver, of course and slingers stones in a small bag, but that’s just one small container of clear and distinct purpose, generally at the waist. This is just a design feature one does not find in the kind of technological environment posited in these games.

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Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’ — Bret C. Devereaux

And the second on the logic of “gold” as a generic currency in fantasy settings compared to historical reality of money and coinage.

But part of the reason these coinage systems work they way they do is that they operated in societies in which a lot of economic activity was non-monetary or at least, non-coinage. And here, we should go back to our ‘money’ vs. ‘currency’ or ‘coinage:’ remember, money came first. So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.

Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.

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The Quietly Coercive Nature of “Vanilla” Sex — Devon Price

Following on from linking to a bunch of his writing this piece from Devon Price that made me reconsider my relationship to sex a bit and do some self-reflection pushed me to start moving forward with trying to get bottom surgery, something I had previously considered but put off.

I think one of the biggest problems in how people conceive of diverse sexualities is by attempting to place all sex acts upon a single hierarchy from “extremely kinky” to “tame.” Under this framework, activities like PIV and oral are viewed as neutral precursors to the racier and more extreme forms of sex that a person must “work themselves up” to – and this obscures that those supposedly neutral sexual activities can be both incredibly exciting & fulfilling to some, and downright disturbing or traumatizing to others.

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According to the Vanilla-to-Kinky Staircase Model, boundaries can only be drawn hierarchically: you can only say no thanks forever to sexual acts that are more “extreme” and higher up on the staircase than the ones you’ve already engaged in. This means that kinky people often feel coerced into sexual acts that do absolutely nothing for them, and non-kinky people are expected to like anything and everything that their social group considers to be ‘standard’ sex.

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AI and Esoteric Fascism — Baldur Bjarnason

Last time I linked to an economics-based analysis of the popularity of software development frameworks. This time fascism, yay 💖

These “bonkers” ideologies are integral to the fascist project as a rationale for atrocities and destruction. They are a belief system that promises a bright future to the selected people and provides them with a systemic rationale for letting mass death happen as “AI” will replace the workers.